Hi
I have been using a Rebel XTi and a Canon 70-200 2.8 to take photos of my kids playing hockey - some turn out better than others. Here is one example. This one was taken in AV at 1600 ISO. The shutter turned out to be 1/250. I have tried lots of different settings but haven't seemed to find what is best - or maybe this photo is as good as I can get?? I have tried shooting in RAW but have found the processing to be a pain in the butt. Any ideas, suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your time.

Hi
Thanks for the ideas. I think I did use some exposure compensation but not enough I guess. By manual white balance do you mean a custom white balance using the ice? Would you suggest moving out of the AV mode to manual? - besides getting to specify the shutter speed what advantage would this give me? Can I compensate for darker images with a faster shutter by upping the exposure compensation?

Also - what did you do to make the ice look nice and white? I've been playing with the software that came with my Mac but haven't been able to do anything like that.

I played around with your picture in iPhoto, a program I don't normally use (I use Lightroom2 and Photoshop mostly). However, as a very recent convert to Mac, I thought I would play with it a bit. Here's what I came up with just using iPhoto. You can adjust for color cast with a color picker - use it to choose something that's either grey or white. I used the ice, though it worked with the boards behind the goalie, too. The program also lets you adjust color manually, but I've never been good with that. You can use the exposure slider to adjust the overall brightness of the picture.

All I did was choose your photo in iPhoto, entered the full frame mode and that enters the edit mode for the program. Click on the adjust button (bottom of screen - there's a pop-up tool bar that's there and it's toward the right) and that brings up a bunch of sliders, along with what looks like an eye dropper (the color picker).

It took me longer to read the help instructions and then figure out how to enter the edit mode to find the adjustment button than it did to make the adjustments. I tried double clicking the picture but that didn't bring up the edit mode. I noticed under view that there was an option for full screen - selected that and it opened the picture in edit mode.

I wasn't trying to adjust it properly - I was only trying to see what iPhoto, a program I'veonly used oncebefore, could do (make adjustments to exposure and white balance, with a program I assume the poster has as it's the program that comes with current Macs). I was mainly surprised that it had the adjustment capability it actually has, and perhaps with some practice, it could be a useful program for those who want an easy to use program that comes free with their computer. However, I found it quite heavy-handed with the slider adjustments,and most likely won't use it again, far preferring Lightroom or Photoshop. I hadpreviously discovered that it doesn't resize large pictures down very well.